Ok, picking up where I left off, the next stage was a plethora of doctor’s visits. I had to see an orthopaedist about my arm and a neurologist about my brain.
There is only one neurologist’s office in Ithaca, making getting an appointment non-trivial (at least if you want one on a short time scale). I therefore ended up going to Syracuse for the neurologist side of things. I wanted to see the neurologist sooner rather than later since I was not allowed to drive until after I’d been cleared by him/her.

The orthopaedist visit was pretty uneventful. The bad news was/is that dislocated shoulders take a very long time to heal. I don’t have my arm in a traditional sling, since the important joint to keep immobilized is the shoulder. Thus, I’m in one of these guys:

I’m even allowed to have my lower arm un-fastened much of the time, since the critical thing is that I don’t move my shoulder.

On the whole, this has been okay and the pain hasn’t been too bad; I was on vicodin for the first week or so, but since then have been coping with just ibuprofen. For the past few weeks it hasn’t been as much a severe pain as it has been persistent. Ibuprofen has only been somewhat effective and the main feature is a sort of low-level burning like the muscles in my upper arm are extremely sore and stiff (feeling vaguely like when the muscles are full of lactic acid?). It’s not really debilitating or anything, but it is very frustrating and very distracting. As a result of this I’ve been unable to get much of anything productive done recently. Hopefully things will be better after I see the orthopaedist again on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll be able to take my arm out of the sling and start some physical therapy, but overall the recovery time for an injury like this is on the order of six months to a year. Ugh.

On the neurology side, I saw a Doctor Smitta Kittur in Syracuse. Since there’s a university there, there are a host of doctors of all sorts of specialties, so it was pretty easy to get an appointment on short notice.
She did a basic neurological exam and ordered an EEG and an MRI. Both of those were mildly entertaining, although the EEG was definitely more exciting since they were attaching twenty-two electrodes to various parts of my head. I felt pretty weird sitting there, but all was well (apparently). The real challenge with having two appointments with the neurologist and two tests in Syracuse was in getting there. I had to get generous people to drive me there. This was made more difficult by the fact that my appointments were during the day when most people have exciting things like classes, work, and so on. So many thanks go out to Amy Long from gaming who drove me to both of the neurologist appointments, Amy Jaffe who came along for the EEG trip, and Jess Sailor who drove me up to my MRI test. She had the honor of being mistaken for my wife by the MRI tech (who said that I could just leave my things in the waiting room with my wife). Apparently we really do bicker like an old married couple

Anyway, having had the second neurologist’s visit, I am now more or less cleared. I don’t have to be on any kind of anti-convulsants, so that’s good. And I’m allowed to drive again (which meant I got to visit Beth last weekend). This doesn’t really leave a good explanation of what caused the syncopal episode (or seizure) and so it’s not terribly satisfying. However, it’s nice to be more or less in the clear now.
There are still a couple of oddities that could warrant further investigation. The first is that on my neurological exams, I had one odd ‘feature’. One thing the doctor does is to run her hand in front of her face (quite close) and asks you to follow it with your eyes. At the very edges (as far to the left and right that I can move my eyes), my eyes do an odd jittering thing, where they skip back and then out again.
Between this and the fact that I feel like I have rather more frequent twitches than I would have thought reasonable, I’m still not quite out of the woods. Also, my white blood cell count was high (when they did tests at the ER) which could indicate an inflammation of the brain somewhere, which could in principle trigger a seizure. I’ll get another blood test before I see Dr. Kittur again, and will hopefully then be able to rule that out. Finally, there could be something cardiological playing into all of this, so I could/should try to go see a cardiologist for some tests.

I’m seeing the neurologist again in the middle of March, so hopefully at that point I’ll really be done with all this.

For now I’m really looking forward to getting my arm out of this silly shoulder immobilizer and be able to stretch it again. Maybe it will even stop hurting at some point so I can get some work done again.

Ok, this seems like as good a time as any to get around to updating this here blog of mine.
This story starts almost four weeks ago, on Jan 12th, when I was cleaning my room (and yes, there is probably a lesson to be learned here somewhere). At 1:37 pm I was talking online to a friend (encouraging her to join in the great cleaning frenzy, as it were). The next thing I have any memory of is feeling very sleepy and being in a lot of pain, thinking that I must have slept badly on my arm because it hurt a lot. I do remember that I felt rather out of it and was at one point kneeling in front of my bed because I was having trouble dealing with the pain. And I was sort of having cold sweats (presumably because I was in shock). I then noticed that I had blood on my hands, and a spot of blood on my jeans, which I then wandered into the bathroom to try to clean out. The blood was from a cut on the top of my head, (the scalp bleeds profusely) and I also had quite a bruise behind one ear and on my chin), giving a total of four points of contact, as it were (three on my head, plus my shoulder).
At some point I wandered out of the door to my room and Greg (my housemate), who was about to head up to campus, saw me and realized that he had to take me to Gannett (university health services). So he drove me up there (in my car). And they quickly saw that I was not doing very well (obviously), and had a someone take care of me pretty quickly. I wasn’t feeling very with it at this point, but I do remember that it wasn’t really until we got to Gannett that I realized that I’d dislocated my shoulder. In retrospect it seems pretty obvious, but I didn’t know that’s what had happened until then.

The staff at Gannett were actually extremely helpful (if you look like you’re dying, they seem to be pretty nice) and I quickly saw a doctor who said I had to go to the hospital. And they called an ambulance because that would probably mean I would get dealt with faster at the hospital. The pain was pretty bad, and when the EMTs arrived they decided to give me morphine in the ambulance, which was very helpful in dealing with the pain, even if it did leave me pretty out of it. They put in an IV (which was quite painless) and we were off to the hospital. The roads of Ithaca are rather bumpy (lots of salt and mediocre maintenance), and this caused me a tremendous amount of pain. My arm was sort of sticking out at a bad angle and couldn’t be down by my side what with my shoulder not being in its socket and all, and so it was sort of banging against she wall. Which was incredibly painful. I have quite a bit of experience with various types of pain (having broken my arm a few times, my hand, sprained elbows, shoulders, etc.), but this was far and away the most pain I have ever been in. Some of you may have had the experience of having a health care type person (nurse, doctor, physician’s assistant, etc.) ask how much pain you’re in, on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable. I tend to assume that everyone overestimates pain and therefore try to not say too high a number, so I started off with 6… However, during the course of the drive to the ER, things got steadily worse (despite having had another dose of morphine), and by the time I was there I was basically having to tell the EMT that I was at 10… I’m glad it wasn’t a longer drive, or I don’t know what would have happened… I suppose you pass out from the pain at some point.

At the hospital they did some neck X-rays (to make sure there weren’t spinal injuries) and then they finally took me off the back-board, which was extremely uncomfortable. Then they took x-rays of my shoulder, which required me to sit up, and at this point I was kind of shaking and also very cold (from the IV). Then they had to put me under not-quite general anesthesia in order to put my arm back in place. The doctor apparently thought I had a very high pain threshold, although I don’t recall him telling me this. He did mention it to Greg, though. Greg came along for this whole exciting trip and was informing the world of what was going on via email since it turns out that Cayuga Medical center has free wireless internet access. He was thus able to answer my phone when Beth called (since she was en route to Ithaca at this point to come visit me for the weekend) and tell her a brief version of what had happened. She said she made rather good time after that; she felt that telling a cop that she her fiance was in the hospital and she didn’t know why really or what had happened to him and was trying to get to him would probably get her out of a speeding ticket.

Anyway, I got home right after Beth arrived there and we took some photos of the crime scene, as it were.

Here we see a picture of where I must have lain on the floor for some amount of time, although since scalp wounds bleed like crazy, it’s hard to know exactly how long I was down. Worth mentioning is that Ernie very very clearly has guilty written all over him. Yes, there is some blood on him, in case that’s not clear. The fact that Ernie was originally a present from Karen of course makes the whole thing far more sinister Well, perhaps not, but it does amuse me a bit that he looks so clearly… guilty, I guess.

Here’s a picture of the staples in my head. Yes, they do look exactly like traditional paper staples. Furthermore, since they weren’t embedded very deeply, you could sort of rock them back and forth. Needless to say, this disturbed some people greatly Anyway, these were taken out a few weeks ago so I no longer have pieces of metal implanted in my head. The nurse insisted on giving them to me to take home, so they’re on my shelf at the moment while I come up with some fitting long-term home for them.

This concludes the first part of the tale… basically, I was told that I probably had a seizure (although it was still not too well determined), that I needed to see a neurologist and an orthopedist for more treatment and diagnostics and I got some pain killers to help me be able to sleep at night. Like I said, a dislocated shoulder is fantastically painful.